Thief (29 page)

Caden’s fingers tightened on Delg’s hilt and pounded love out of his heart, repeating the word
Sais—Saxon—
over and over in his mind, until rage filled it. Rage would keep him alive.

“’Tis true,” one of the Saxons averred. The one who’d escaped across the river. “I saw it with me own eyes!”

“Home at last, and now that home is to become a bloody battleground,”
Sorcha sang, her fingers playing a lament sweet enough to make a grown man cry.
“Men on both sides must die, perhaps even the man I love.”
She struck the harp so hard that the second mention of
love
had no chance to survive Caden’s start.

“And for what? This dog’s revenge?”
she challenged.

To Caden’s horror, she turned Elfwyn and started toward Tunwulf, where the current swept wide downriver toward the Tweed.

“A noble Saxon warrior fights for plunder and land. I know your plight.”
The harp strings ached for them.
“You were driven from your homeland the same as my father Wulfram … by a rising sea you could not fight. But not to ride for a father-killing whelp whom you know will never receive his father’s inheritance. If you do not fight for Hussa, he will not reward you,”
she shouted.

“She lies. She insults you,” Tunwulf growled. He started for Sorcha again, but this time two of his men checked him with low words.

Alarm pricked mightily at the back of Caden’s neck as they glanced toward the hillfort. So did Caden. As far as he could see, only the Cymri guard moved about, staring downhill at the river.

“But I will,”
Sorcha continued.
“And my reward will cost no bloodshed.”

What?
Caden’s jaw slackened in disbelief as Sorcha wrestled her precious leather sack from her saddle. She reached in and withdrew strings of amber that seemed to burst into blaze, once exposed to the rising sun.

“I have jewels and gold. All you have to do is leave this cur and fetch it for yourselves,”
she sang and upended the bag. Glittering jewels or rings, lashed to chunks of wood, cascaded in a fall of rich splendor into the water beside Elfwyn, where the current swept it in a rush downstream where the river widened. Wide-eyed Saxons raced toward their horses as Tunwulf screamed at them.

“Not now! Only two of you. Not now!”

But it was too late. Half the men were bent on chasing the floating treasure downriver. The other half wavered, hands on their weapons, waiting amidst the confusion for their furious leader to give them orders.

“Take her!” Tunwulf roared.

But Sorcha already raced for Trebold. Caden gigged his borrowed steed’s side, leading his men across the ford and putting the snorting beast between Tunwulf and the retreating Elfwyn. He met Tunwulf’s blade with a slash of his own. Metal crashed against metal as he bypassed the Saxon leader and turned his steed. He hated fighting on horseback. He could have finished Tunwulf by now.

Three Saxons raced at Caden, axes hefted. He seized his spear and thrust it, striking one through the throat. Another he knocked into the path of his companion with his horse, and slashed at both with Delg. He nicked flesh, though he doubted it was a killing blow.

As he bore down on Tunwulf again, he saw that Sorcha had crossed the ford and stood in her saddle behind the line his men formed. Ronan held the line at the other end, while warriors, torches ready, manned the firewall.

Midway across the water, Tunwulf hesitated chest deep in the rushing water. When Ronan’s Cymri did not charge to meet him, he turned back toward an isolated Caden. “Don’t let him cross,” he shouted to his men.

Saxons swarmed like flies to his horse’s flank. Caden considered riding Tunwulf down, but once he and the Saxon clashed, the water would hold them, and Saxons would close on him. Tempting as it was, much as he laughed at death in the past, four words would not allow it. Words that had etched themselves onto his heart in spite of his resistance.

The man I love.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Caden swerved the horse at the bank and cut a wide path with Delg, forcing his pursuers away. With a loud “Hee-yah,” he made for a wing of the fire ditch where his men had formed a shieldwall. Saxons charged into the water, some afoot and others on horseback. But as they straggled out of the water on the other side and hurled themselves at the flimsy rampart of wicker and staves, the Cymri tossed their torches onto the pitch- and brush-filled ditch behind it. A fire shot up along the length of the pitch-dabbed fence, turning it into a wall of fire with sharpened teeth grinning through it. The burst of heat drove the attacking forces back into the water, where Glenarden’s archers sent them a shower of arrows.

Smoke spread like a black monster of death that rose from Hades and dispersed to confuse the living. Saxons screamed and cursed, the fit dragging the wounded back to the waterside encampment. Caden’s shieldwall opened, allowing him and his horse through. With the slam of wood to wood, it closed behind him, spear points bristling over it.

But the Saxons regrouped beyond the range of the archers and did not charge again. Not that Caden could blame them. Better than half their number was dead or wounded. No Cymri had fallen.

“Caden!” Sorcha ran from Elfwyn toward him, arms outstretched.

He slid off his panting steed. He wanted to strangle her, to shake her until she never thought to help him again. But more than that—

He caught her as she threw herself into his arms and kissed him.

And he kissed her back. With every emotion she’d ever conjured in him. Fear and desire, exasperation and protection, anger and love. All fierce—not one could he separate from the other. He shouldn’t, but, Abba help him, there was no stopping this landslide of feelings he’d kept barreled up inside.

“Good thing the Saxons retreated,” Ronan shouted dourly, exacting a roar of laughter from the warriors who’d enjoyed their first taste of victory.

Caden finally pulled away and trapped Sorcha’s face between his hands. “If you ever decide to help me again
without letting me know—
”

“You wouldn’t have allowed it,” she replied with an unrepentant smile.

“No, I would not—”

“And I managed to cut the enemy number in half for you.” A smug, unrepentant smile.

“I … you—” As Caden floundered for reprimand, a shout in the distance drew his attention.

A single man raced down from the hillfort waving a ragged banner made of his cloak. “Saxons!” he shouted hoarsely. “At the fort … they’re upon us!”

“My men,” Ronan commanded. “Shieldwall to the rear of the tavern.”

“Egan,” Caden shouted.

He didn’t have to spell it out for the burly champion. “Done!” Half of Caden’s men followed Egan’s lead to the area just vacated by Ronan; the others remained, tightening their defenses.

“The rest of you keep the fires going,” Caden shouted as he shoved Sorcha toward the house. “Get inside and stay there. Promise me, or the sight of you in harm’s way will cost me my life.”

Sorcha nodded. “We’ll defend the house.”

“Aye.” Caden couldn’t help but laugh, for her hand went to the hilt of a short sword hung in her belt beneath her robe. And he had no doubt that his firebrand would use it. She’d bested Wada once, but Wada had been armed with only a knife, not with deadly Sais axes. But then, Caden had no intention of letting a Saxon near the house. Alive, anyway.

Caden joined Egan’s remaining men. Their force was now dangerously split into two groups, but thanks to Sorcha, the treasure chasers had halved the number of Saxons they fought, whittling them down to a manageable size. He took the position to the right of the shieldwall, the most vulnerable, for there was no shield to guard his sword arm. But it was also Caden’s most deadly side.

Ronan had taken a position across the rear of the tavern rather than racing uphill to fight the Saxon attack there. His men would be spent by the time they raced to the rescue of the hillfort, and those in the hillfort would be dead by the time they reached them anyway. Together, the brothers could protect the tavern … for a while.

Caden’s men engaged the enemy and held them at the river with such vigor and valor that if Sorcha lived, this battle would live on in song. But they needed more men. Noting that the Saxons had no band of archers like Glenarden, Sorcha asked for volunteers among the women to keep the fire pit burning, thus allowing a few more men to back up the river force. But she kept her word to Caden. She remained in the door of the tavern, while the womenfolk poured out into the yard carrying brooms, pokers, kitchen knives, and cleavers—anything that could be used for a weapon if need be—and began feeding the fire from the stock of wood and brush gathered the night before. So freed, the fire tenders reinforced their comrades.

And so it went, neither side seeming to gain ground, neither side losing it. The Saxons attacked, did their worst, and retreated from the weapons of Caden’s warriors, although the show of blood was enough to turn Sorcha’s stomach.

“Malachy is holding on the hill,” Myrna marveled at Sorcha’s side, startling her. “I don’t know how, but Ronan’s men have seen neither blade nor spear shaft.”

Yet the fight seemed so futile. “God knows, I tried so hard to—”

Her mother put a finger to Sorcha’s lips. “Never have I seen braver trust in God. But now it is He who must save us … before our men grow too weary to lift a blade.”

“Or have none to lift,” Sorcha added, speaking of the tossed spears and spent arrows. The arrows found more Saxon shields than men after that first attack.

“Or run out of fuel for the firewall.” Myrna crossed herself, for the stores of brush and wood were nearly gone.

A loud ram’s horn blasted through the air from the east road beyond the river. Adversaries who were clutched in a battle of push and pull with their shields fell away from each other, looking in the direction of the borderland between Trebold and Bernicia. Try as she might, Sorcha could not see through the smoke.

One of the women near the fire shrieked, “Saxons! An army of them!”

Ice formed in Sorcha’s chest. “No.” It couldn’t be. Not more of them.

Half of Ronan’s shield line abandoned its seemingly pointless position at the rear and raced to the river to reinforce Caden and his men. Sorcha shouted for the women to retreat into the house, but aside from a few, most stood their ground.

“If we die, ’twill be with our menfolk,” a round, toothless matron with a shaggy mop of hair shouted in defiance as she brandished a cleaver.

“Mathair, see to the children,” Sorcha said. She’d been seven the last time she’d seen such carnage, but she remembered. “The Saxons will sell the young as slaves.”

She said no more, for Myrna knew all too well the fate of the old and worthless. Had she not been mistaken for dead the day Sorcha was taken, Myrna would have been taken as well. Not so now, when her red hair was threaded with white.

Sorcha drew her short sword and started into the yard to join the other women when Caden’s words stopped her.

“The sight of you in harm’s way will cost me my life.”

With a groan of frustration, she turned and rushed upstairs to the bedchamber overlooking the river. She would not put him in harm’s way, but the moment he fell—

She clasped her hands to her heart.
Heavenly Father, don’t let it happen.

But if it did, Saxon blood would stain the metal of the short sword she’d taken from one of the sleeping men in the barn that morning when she fetched Elfwyn.

From the upstairs window level, the smoke was not as thick, enabling her to see the enemy dancing and singing in welcome to the army marching under the banner of the white dragon. Tunwulf—the blackguard in his cloak of bones still lived—threw open his arms in welcome as one of the mounted warriors spurred his horse ahead of the others.

Aethelfrith’s princely fur-trimmed cloak flew scarlet behind him as he galloped, his polished sword raised and glittering in the morning sun toward his friend. But upon reaching him, the Dieran prince swung his sword downward and away, lopping off Tunwulf’s head in the breadth of Sorcha’s horror-stricken gasp. A fountain of scarlet sprung in its place, and Sorcha reeled away from the window at the brutal carnage.

“
Murderer!”
The Dieran prince’s shout drew her back. Her stomach roiled as she watched Aethelfrith ride in full circle around the fallen leader’s astonished men. “For the Lady Sorcha and the king!” he declared, blood-soaked blade raised to the sky.

Sorcha’s head grew light, lighter than the gray smoke drifting skyward. This, Sorcha recalled, was why her cousin Eadric insisted a female bard on a battlefield was frowned upon.

For the Lady Sorcha and the king!

The princeling’s declaration
swirled in and around her brain. Or perhaps it was the relief that lifted her consciousness away. Relief that, somehow, God had exonerated her. Regardless, it was a sweet escape to a bloodless place.